1. Field of the Invention
One aspect of the present invention relates to a computer-implemented personal information manager method and system.
2. Background Art
Mismanagement of personal estates may result in the loss of assets to individuals and their beneficiaries. The term beneficiaries can refer to, but is not limited to, beneficiaries, devisees, joint tenants and/or heirs. Currently, many banks, financial institutions, and insurance companies retain hundreds of billions of dollars in unclaimed assets. According to recent estimates, the proceeds of one in four life insurance policies remain unclaimed, and about sixteen (16) billion dollars of matured United States savings bonds remain unclaimed. These and other investments often remain unclaimed because the beneficiaries of a deceased benefactor are unaware of the death and/or of the existence of the investment.
Systems, in some instances, computer-implemented systems, exist for tracking the mortality of individuals and notifying beneficiaries of the death of the benefactor. In certain regards, mortality tracking involves determining mortality information, i.e. whether an individual is alive or deceased. However, these systems can be error prone since the data used for tracking is often unreliable. Moreover, these systems often passively track the mortality of individuals. Consequently, the mortality information is gathered in an untimely and inefficient manner.
Further, the problems of managing an estate are often complicated by the current trend of retired individuals to live part of the year in one state and part of the year in another state. This often means that the individual may have two sets of accounts, one in each state, two sets of advisers, etc. This scenario makes it harder to monitor the death of an individual. For instance, an attorney in Michigan may check the legal notices in Michigan to determine if a client for whom she is holding a will has died. If the client dies while wintering in Florida, the notice may be published in Florida, but not Michigan, making it very difficult for the attorney to hear of the death of the individual. Also, when close relatives of the deceased are based in one state and the deceased lives, at least part of the time, in another state, it makes it less likely the close relatives have independent knowledge about the advisers the deceased person had in the other state and assets located in the other state.
Thus, there exists a need to check a central database, e.g. the U.S. Social Security Administration mortality death index, for mortality tracking purposes. Also, there is a need to have information accessible on a website because a website can be accessed anywhere and the information can be obtained wherever it is needed.
Moreover, what is needed is a computer-implemented method and system having tracking and/or notification functionality for efficiently and timely informing an access individual of the personal information of a monitored individual. There also is a need to provide an automated system for determining the mortality information of the monitored individual and notifying the access individual, in case of death of the monitored individual.